Hung Out to Dry
by Zappanale
Summary: A Vice City hitman, recently released from prison, goes back to work for Tommy Vercetti who is now a major crime lord and tries to adapt to life in the 90s. Set before GTA III but after San Andreas. Please read and review!
1. Into the Open

**Author's Note: **This is the first bit of GTA fanfiction I've written in a while, so bear with me if I make a mistake on a name or location. The story is this: a hired killer, fresh out of prison, is contacted by Tommy Vercetti and hired for his organization. This is set after the events of San Andreas but before the events of GTA III.

Alright...so, enjoy! Please read and review!

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A Vercetti man was waiting for him outside the prison. Louis saw him and immediately thought 'setup', but there were no other cars and the man standing there wasn't a killer in any regard. Besides, why would anyone want to kill him? A washed up shooter from times long past? It seemed outlandish that a Vercetti man would even be here to see him. 

The man was standing in front of a older car, a Hermes, burgundy in colour. It was in stellar condition and would've gleamed in the sunlight if there'd been any sunlight that day. The man who stood in front of it looked like the kind of person who'd drive that car. Short, bald save for a ring of hair around his dome, with a round face and big dimples and fat cheeks. He looked like a cake: wide and soft and pale white. There was a cigarette in his left hand. Louis said nothing for a long time, just stood there and watched this old man who he'd known years ago.

"Louis Vachss," the man said. The hair on his dome had flecks of gray in it that hadn't been there before, Louis noticed. "Thought I'd never see you again."

Louis said, "Give me a cigarette."

The man reached into a pocket of his suit--which was dark grey, double breasted, tailored, and obviously extremely expensive--and withdrew a pack of Dunhills. Louis's brand. He passed them over and Louis lit up with a fake plastic zippo. He took a drag. First cigarette in freedom. Don't'cha' love it?

The man said, "Come on. I'll drive you to your hotel." Louis coughed: the cigarette was good and it bothered his lungs after years of shitty smuggled Generics. "What hotel?" he asked.

The man winked and got into the car, which shifted from side to side a little because of his weight. Louis looked up and down the road again: parolees getting into cars, getting onto buses, standing around waiting. He shrugged and said, "What the hell," and got in on the passenger side, throwing his suitcase with it's meager containments into the back. The man started to drive.

The man's name was Paul Lazzarro, and he was one of Vercetti's money men. An accountant type. He'd gone to work for the gangsters almost as soon as he left college because of his father, Tito Lazzarro, who'd been a controlling presence in the organized crime circles of Carcer City. Twenty years of Mafia money-making later and he was firmly under the employment of Tommy Vercetti, Mr. Vice City himself. Tito hadn't ever killed anyone. He'd probably never gotten in a fight. Louis only knew him second handedly from the old days, before the prison sentence.

For a while they cruised silently through Vice City, passing the old familiar places: Downtown past the skyscrapers and business hubs, Little Havana, Little Haiti, Kaufman Cabs. Louis had flashbacks: gunfights on the Star Island bridge, killings in the backseats of Vercetti's cabs, drugs coming in through the Cherry Popper ice cream factory. Paul deliberately took the long way round: he swung around Washington Beach before coming up on the main hotel strip of Ocean Beach.

Lazzarro parked the car and Louis grabbed his bag and stepped out onto the street, feeling a cool spring air ruffle his body.

Lazzarro said, "Kenny Shanks is coming by in the morning 'round ten to pick you up." Lazzarro reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a roll of bills: two thousand dollars in hundreds. Louis looked at the money without trust. What was Lazzarro pulling?"

"Here," the fat accountant said, "Buy yourself a suit. You go to see the boss looking like that and he'll shit." Louis looked at his clothes: grey slacks thinning at the knees, a black button-up shirt with short sleeves and a snake design on one side, old dress shoes with nearly broken soles. He said, "What's wrong with the way I dress?"

Lazzarro laughed. He fucking roared. He put the car in gear and tossed Louis his pack of Dunhills. "Remember: Kenny Shanks, ten AM. Don't be anywhere else and don't fuck with Kenny, he's got a temper and likes to carry around a piece."

Lazzarro roared off. Louis watched the car turn a corner and dissappear, and then he went into the Hideaway Hotel, which claimed itself to be Vice City's Number One Hotel, Right By the Beach. Louis knew for a fact that Vercetti ran--or used to run, back in the day--hookers and gambling and drugs out of the place.

The receptionist was a fag with vampy eyeshadow. He said, "Reservation?" He eyed Louis's crotch. He scoped the prison tattoo on his left arm: a weird tangle of black thorny vines stretching from his elbow to his wrist on the forearm.

Louis said, "Vachss. For one." The receptionist clacked away on a computer--Christ, Louis thought as he looked at the sleek machine, have I been away for a long fucking time--and then said, "Room 17 on the third floor." He handed Louis a card. Louis said, "Fuck is this?"

The receptionist giggled for a moment but when he saw that Louis was serious he said, "It's how you open your door. There's a slot for it beside the knob."

Louis eyed the card, warily. He said, "Alright," and then took the elevator to his floor.

He got the room open after only five or six minutes of struggling, and once inside tossed his suitcase on the floor and fell on the bed. The room was nice enough: a lounge area, a TV, a kitchenette, a small walk-in closet, a big bed. Everything seemed different than how it used to be, though. No more gaudy reds and blues and pinks, no more New Wave posters on the wall. Louis lit a cigarette and turned on the TV and even _that_ seemed different, just the way the shows looked. He didn't recognize any of the channels and after a while fell back onto the bed and closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and fought frustration.

Twenty minutes later he pocketed the roll of money and went to go buy a suit.


	2. A Suit

**Author's Note: **Not much to say. Please read and review, and I hope you enjoy.

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He walked slowly through the streets. EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT. 

Different stores, different paint jobs on _old _stores. Back in the day Louis had scoffed at the clothing people wore, the square ties and tight spandex and big hairdos. He missed them now because back then he'd assumed they would last forever.

The clothes were loose now. The ties were narrow and pointed. The hair was either short or long and scraggly. Teenagers, who'd formerly dressed in leather and fishnets and all other fashions of strange New-Wave clothing, were now wearing loose jeans and long checkered shirts. They talked about a guy named Kurt Cobain. They talked about a band called Pearl Jam. They smoked joints in public and looked sulky.

That hadn't changed, though. The teenagers had always been sulky.

The suit store was another block away. The Ocean Beach strip hadn't changed much: still a lot of hotels, most of them associated with sand or water in some way. The Sandbar Hotel, The Oasis Hotel, The Mohito Hotel, The Shoreline Hotel. Gaudy places with big neon marquees. Tommy Vercetti had points in nearly all of them. Tommy Vercetti had points in EVERYTHING. Tommy Vercetti fucking owned Vice City.

Louis rounded the corner.

Raphael's was gone.

Didier Sachs was in it's place.

He stood for a moment, wide eyes. Where had the place gone? Raphael's was _the _place for a suit back then. The only place, the best place. Good prices, good quality. Top notch. How had Vercetti let a fucking chain store like Didier goddamn Sachs take over?

The answer was simple: money. That's all it boiled down to. Didier Sachs looked small in the middle of that busy intersection, it's windows all filled with mannequins dressed in all manners of evening and formal and business wear.

No 80s style suits. The Sonny Crockett trend had gone, Louis supposed. He crossed the street quickly and went inside.

A fussy man wearing a leisure suit with rings on all his pretty little fingers was busy measuring something when Louis entered, and when the door chime sounded he looked up and smiled. The shop was empty: apparently nobody else needed to buy a suit at ten o'clock PM. The man said, "_Hel-_lo, Mr. Customer, my name is Francois and _I _will be serving you today."

Louis looked for no-smoking signs and spotted one. In Raphael's he had been able to smoke.

"I need a suit," he said.

The fussy man looked him up and down and smiled coyly and said, "I'll _say_ you do." His voice had a lilt to it. "Let me just take your measurements, m'kay? This'll only be a second. Come this way." Louis followed him into a backroom set with full-length mirrors and a dressing room and all kinds of materials piled up here and there.

"Now," the fussy man said, "What kind of suit do you want? What style?" He said this as he measured. Louis considered. He said, after a pause, "I don't know. I don't know what the style is anymore."

The fussy man nodded as if he'd expected that answer. He smiled at Louis. He scoped Louis's tight muscles and Louis's prison tattoo.

Louis vibed gangster: he was 6'2, 190 lbs, brown curly hair atop a narrow square jawed head. His eyes were dead grey. His cheeks were sallow, the laugh lines very prounounced. He bore a strong resemblance to the musician Lou Reed.

The fussy man finished his measurements, went into the store proper, returned with suit jackets and pants and ties and shirts. For the next half-hour Louise tried shit on: first a cream jacket that made him look like an evangelist, then a powder blue suit with a powder blue shirt and a powder blue tie that made him look like a pimp. The last suit was the one he liked the best: black with a thin white pinstripe, tight fitting, a grey shirt and no tie.

It cost seven hundred. Louis paid, had the suit put in a garment bag, and walked back to the hotel.

He fell asleep. Dreams of Tommy Vercetti, the big man behind the city, plagued him.

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**Author's Note: **Next chapter, Louis meets Vercetti again! STAY TUNED...and review! 


	3. Old News

**Author's Note:** I realize I haven't updated in a fucking year, and I very very much apologize for that. My interests tend to fluctuate rapidly. I'll try harder, I promise. I just hope people are still around to read this thing.

There'll be some references to San Andreas and Saint's Row in this chapter.

The year, I suppose, is 1999.

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The yard stretched on forever. Tommy Vercetti watched it out of his office window, looked at the imported grass and the freshly scrubbed sports cars in the driveway and the big bright sun above it all, that trademark Vice City sun, making the water around the island sparkle. A woman in a halter top walked by his front gate and a burly bodyguard in a Hawaiian shirt and a suit said something to her and the woman giggled and walked on. 

Tommy's office was the same but different, the styles subtly updated to suit the modern age. He wore an expensive sport shirt and a summer weight dark red suit with a small pink hankerchief pointing out, the outfit bought by one of his mistresses for a birthday the year before. His face was older, deeper set and lined by his years of stress controlling organized crime in Vice City, and his hands sitting on the arms of his oak framed desk chair were pampered and manicured.

He hadn't touched a gun in seven years. His hair was black, peppered with gray. When he swung the chair around Paul Lazzarro could see that he'd gotten his teeth recapped, the one's he'd lost in the streets of Liberty City replaced with space age pearly whites.

Tommy fucking Vercetti. The most feared Forelli enforcer _ever_ now looked like he belonged in a golf club instead of hustling on the street. How you do go on.

Vercetti pulled a cigar out of a large case on the desk, lit it with a gold Zippo which he tossed to Lazzarro who lit a cigar of his own. Reports lay on Vercetti's desk, legal stuff: invoices and cash balances of his various businesses, court summonses for his henchmen, letters of thanks and letters of want from local charities. Vercetti threw the letters away and put the bills and balances in a tray on his desk and said, "Who've I got today?"

Lazzarro checked his watch: nearly eleven in the morning. Vercetti had already met with his four liutenants: Nance, Mosca, O'Reilly, and Urbano, the captains who controlled various sectors of his influence in the city, had already heard their various problems and had already devised solutions. It left only a few things for him to do: handle miscellaneous meetings and talk with out of town men.

Out of town. In the years since Tommy's split from Liberty City mob factions the gangsters had all come for him, asking for help and supply, and Vercetti, in addition to his hearty income from Vice City distribution, began selling his product wholesale to gangsters nationwide. Carl Johnson, a black guy who pretty much ran crime in the East Coast bought from him. Julius Bonner, a boss from Stilwater, bought his package. A Carcer City mobster named D'Amico bought from him.

All of them did. Except the Liberty City bosses who just couldn't get it out of their heads. Vercetti knocked off Sonny Forelli, a deed that could not go unpunished. But they couldn't very well just send a guy after him, could they? Especially with the friends he had, with the _muscle_ he had.

Speaking of muscle.

"You've got..." Lazzarro ran through the list in his head, hating Vercetti's 'nothing on paper' rule. "Lee Ronalds, the hardware store guy. He owes a few thousand in protection, hasn't paid for a while."

Vercetti nodded. "We already send Mickey after him?" Michael "Mickey Pipes" Hanna was Vercetti's chief enforcer, a Stilwater killer who had more bodies to his name than almost any other gangster or murderer in the country.

Lazzarro nodded. "Yeah, he said that Ronalds oughta' pay up this time." Lazzarro adjusted his glasses, lit a cigar with Vercetti's lighter and tossed it back. Lazzarro was essentially a consigliere, the right hand, and if Vercetti should die he would probably be the one to take over the whole operation.

"Alright," Vercetti said, "Who else?"

"Let's see...Gigi Baca, one of Urbano's people, he wanted to talk with you about something to do with some guys shaking him down."

"What the fuck? He can't go to Urbano about that shit?"

"He wants to talk with you. You want me to call him, tell him to piss off?"

"Yeah. Fuck him. Thinks he can go around the fucking chain of command."

Lazzarro made a note on a pad of paper on his lap: 'CALL GIGI'. Vercetti's wedding finger had a ruby ring on it and he clacked this against his desk impatiently, waiting for Lazzarro to continue.

"Alright," Lazzarro said, "We've got...one of Robina's people, wants to meet with you on behalf of Umberto, guy named Amistád. It's about some problem they're having with, uh, unaffiliated dealers on their corners."

In the years since Vercetti took control, Umberto Robina and his gang went to work for him, under his captain Sanguaro Urbano. They became the street connection, his main distributors, the guys that sold the shit he got from Colombia out on the street. Robina ran things well: the man had a nice house on Vice Point well away from the ghetto.

"Alright," Vercetti said.

Lazzarro continued, "And we have Louis Vachss."

Vercetti leaned back his chair, his face slightly surprised. Louis Vachss: this soon. "Christ," he said. "Louis. I ain't seen him in...fuck, how longs' he been in?"

"Since '89," Lazzarro said, pulling out Vachss' rap sheet. Arrested and convicted 1989: homicide in the first degree. The sentence was twenty to life, up for parole in ten. The only reason Vachss ever even GOT that parole, as violent a prisoner as he was, was because of Vercetti's friends in the system who put in a good word.

And also because he paid thirty grand to the parole board.

"Vachss...was a time you'd hear that guys' name and shit your pants, you know?" Lazzarro knew. When Vercetti took power he organized his gang, put everyone in their crew, insulated himself. One man stood out among all others, a man in Mosca's crew who ran stolen cars and pulled liquor store robberies on the side, a twenty one year old hoodlum from the trailer park with no money to his name and his family already in the ground. Vachss was vicious, more than any one person should be. Vercetti picked him, groomed him: showed him how to dress, how to talk, how to hustle.

Told him how to kill.

Louis Vachss murdered over thirty people in Tommy Vercetti's service, all in the years between 1986 and 1989. In 1989 he pulled a job risky even by his standards: a job on police. Three cops murdered in three nights, a pistol he left behind un-wiped of prints at one scene came back on him, and he was locked up before Vercetti could say 'bribe'.

Vercetti didn't know how he fared in jail. He sent packages every few weeks: money, cigarettes, porno mags, sometimes drugs. Vachss never called, never sent a letter.

At the mention of Vachss's name, Mickey Hanna said from his shadowy position by the door, "You talkin' bout that curly haired little mook what whacked out them cops way back when?"

Hanna stood six foot four, two hundred fifty pounds, a wall of brute force and savagery. Tommy said, "Use some respect, you talk about that guy. He's done more work in three years than you done your whole life. When's he comin' in, Paul?"

Lazzarro said, "One o'clock. After Robina's man."

Vercetti nodded, said, "Get him some hookers for his room at the hotel afterward, alright? Give him a homecoming. I gotta' throw a party for this guy. Jesus Christ, Louis Vachss."

Lazzarro said, "You think he can still hold a lit match to his eye without blinking?"

Vercetti snorted at the memory of Louis's old party trick. "Shit. After ten years inside? He can probably catch bullets in his fucking teeth."

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**Author's Note: **Next chapter should be soon, I promise. 


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